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An Iowa Woman's TM Road Leads to Africa
by Bob Saar

Enjoy TM News, reprinted from The Hawk Eye    Translate This Article
19 June 2018

Enjoy TM News editor's note: ''We're grateful to the author and publisher for permission to reprint this article, '52 Faces: Road to Africa Is Paved with Good Intentions,' from The Hawk Eye, the oldest newspaper in Iowa, USA. It originally appeared on May 20, 2018.'' Following are a few excerpts from the original article written by Bob Saar:

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Leslee Goldstein earned her Ph.D. in Vedic Science at Maharishi University of Management. . . . ''I've always worked on projects for women; I gravitated toward different projects that had to do with women,'' she said. ''For my Ph.D. I decided to do a research study on Transcendental Meditation with women, and then I narrowed it to mothers.''

There wasn't any research on TM and mothers at the time.

''I feel the role of a mother is so important everywhere, anywhere in the world, because a mother is the first teacher. From the rock of mother, the children learn language, they learn culture, they learn how to behave, they learn how to speak,'' Goldstein said. ''A mother's job is a challenging job: You have to be a doctor; you have to be a counselor, a cook—you have to be everything. The list goes on and on, and her job is 24/7; it doesn't stop. So I started to see how important it is in general for mothers to have a way to stay balanced and to help them do their jobs, because it's critical for the world.''

Goldstein wanted to do her research in Africa, and she put out the word to some of the directors of projects around the world. She knew she had an idea whose time had come.

''Within 48 hours, I had a project with 81 single, illiterate mothers living in poverty in Kampala, in the village of Nsambya in Uganda,'' she said.


Mothers meditating together at United Women's Platform for Empowerment and Development (UWOPED) in Kampala, Uganda (photo by Alena Goldstein)


Three-fourths of the women in Uganda live in poverty. Of all the people living in poverty in the world, 70 percent are women. . . .

''They have huge resilience, huge endurance. This is the lot they were given in life, and somehow, when given the opportunity to do something, TM helped them to do something for themselves, by themselves,'' Dr. Goldstein said [commenting on results found by the women in her study]. ''We call it empowerment from within. You can't empower another person; it has to come from inside. So they started to feel more confident, more motivated. We have lots of interviews where they would tell us, 'I can think better.' ''

To read the original article, visit The Hawk Eye

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Learn more about African Women and Girls Organization for Total Knowledge (AWAGO)

A video about Ugandan women who have learned the TM technique (4:59) is posted in both the Enjoy TM News and The Hawk Eye articles.

Editor's note: Dr. Goldstein's research study was published on March 18, 2018:
Leslee Goldstein, Sanford I. Nidich, Rachel Goodman, and David Goodman (2018), ''The Effect of Transcendental Meditation on Self-Efficacy, Perceived Stress, and Quality of Life in Mothers in Uganda,'' Health Care for Women International. 

Please contact lgoldstein@mum.edu to receive the full research article.

SOURCE: Excerpts from article in Enjoy TM News—which was reprinted with permission from the original article by Bob Saar in The Hawk Eye.

Copyright © 2018 GateHouse Media, LLC

See related article:
New research shows Transcendental Meditation empowers disadvantaged Ugandan mothers



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